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Taking an outside-in perspective of the technology design can help prevent extravagant groupthink among the project team in which creative sessions lead to overly complex requirements. Engaging the users earlier can lead to simpler processes where essential data gets captured to drive better customer, supplier and employee experiences, rather than a model in which all possible data is captured and then an overly complicated system is designed to use it.
Finance leaders would also benefit from a product-based approach to technology design whereby users can test and provide feedback at various stages throughout development. This will improve staff engagement by allowing them to influence the design. It can also improve the ultimate success of the technology implementation as staff will have been able to experiment, learn and master the technology along the way.
Key actions for CFOs:
- Build technology solutions with the end user in mind. Determine how the technology will improve business outcomes as well as customer and employee satisfaction.
- Prioritize progress over perfection. Implement the technology to help make the transformation real and prove the value of the new technology-enabled approaches early.
- Identify the critical skills and capabilities. Through a combination of hiring, upskilling or reskilling, partnering and outsourcing, cultivate the right digital mindset and skillset to turn the potential value of technology into reality.
- Give teams the time to get to know the technology and experiment with it during the design and build phases to help shape the configuration and deliver better outcomes.
6. Collaborate: design for collaboration and co-create new ways of working
Although nearly half (48%) of finance leaders believe that processes were designed to ensure good collaboration across the business during the transformation, only 31% of employees in the finance function agreed with this. This gap is also significant when compared to other functions. It points to the wider challenge that finance workers don’t feel that leaders are seeking or valuing their input during the transformation. To increase the chances of transformation success, our research suggests that consciously creating the space for new ways of working is critical. CFOs need to break down siloed and hierarchical ways of working, and adopt a cross-discipline approach that brings in fresh perspectives and enables everyone involved in the transformation to reimagine process, ownership and empowerment.
Key actions for CFOs:
- Break down silos and foster a culture of collaboration and ingenuity. Enable and incentivize managers and their teams to be inquisitive and to collaborate with their peers. Teams are more likely to drive collaboration through process once the incentives and culture are in place.
- Co-create new ways of working that empower workers to redesign and redefine their own work, both in terms of what work and behaviors need to shift and how work gets done. Consider diversity within teams, such as pairing a designer and developer with a businessperson as an observer.
- Encourage teams to imagine a future where their roles will change for the better, particularly if they design out the need for interventions for re-work and overcoming existing constraints.
- Identify the influencers in your organization and use them proactively to solicit constant feedback to determine how well new ways of working have been embedded, and seek their input on changes that might need making.
- Design processes around the data with the intent of capturing it right the first time to enable minimal data-related interactions across processes and be more creative in how to use information to drive better interactions and outcomes.
Transformation success comes from putting people at the center
CFOs are privileged to have a holistic view of the organization. They are well-positioned to set the tone in developing leading practices for each of the six levers of transformation.
Today’s CFOs need to consciously invest in empowering their people and the level of engagement they have with the transformation objectives to maximize the probability of success. This includes creating a vision they can believe in and leading with a “we” not “me” approach. They focus on their people by providing the right level of emotional support to sustain engagement, as well as upskilling individuals and teams so that they can find new ways of working and incubating new ideas. Finally, they instill confidence in their ability to thrive, with the aid of digital tools and technologies that remove much of the routine drudgery that may prevent finance teams from protecting and driving value for the business.